Jon Bloom's Blog, page 30

Lay Aside the Weight of Self-Pity

I love Jonah not just because of the whole fish episode, but because Jonah is a self-pitying sulker. I don’t endorse his self-pity, but I do identify with it since I’m given to similar kinds of sulking. And I’m thankful that in the Bible God shows the warts of his servants, because I have many warts too. And Jonah reminds me of God’s mercy toward self-pitying sulkers like me and encourages me to lay aside this sinful weight.

A Self-Pitying Prophet

You probably know the story well. God commissioned Jonah to warn the Assyrian capital, Ninevah, that his judgment was about to fall. Jonah suspected God’s gracious motives and jumped on a ship headed in the opposite direction. So God sent a big fish taxi to intercept him and vomit him back out on the beach. Then a repentant Jonah wisely obeyed God, prophesied to the great city, and repentance broke out.

This result “displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry” (Jonah 4:1). He knew the Assyrians: they were brutal to their enemies, and in the future they were going to attack Israel; they deserved God’s judgment. And he knew God: he was merciful to his enemies, forgiving undeserving repentant sinners, even brutal Assyrians. Sure enough, just as Jonah feared, the Assyrians repented and God relented. Jonah got so angry he wanted to die (Jonah 4:3).

And here’s where we see the all-too familiar marks of self-pity.

Jonah then went outside the city to sulk and watch. Perhaps God would have the good sense to destroy Ninevah after all, but it didn’t look good. God kindly cheered the prophet by causing a plant to grow over his little booth and shade him from the blazing sun. Then God sent a worm to kill the plant and thus the prophet’s shade. This also made Jonah so angry he wanted to die. God responded:

“You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:10–11)

Jonah pitied the plant because it shaded him. When the plant died the sun made him feel faint (Jonah 4:8). Everything felt so unjust: undeserving Ninevah repenting and the plant perishing. God wasn’t giving Jonah his way in anything. Jonah turned bitter and he even lashed out at God (Jonah 4:9).

The Heart-Hardening Power of Self-Pity

Self-pity wasn’t the only thing Jonah was feeling, but its presence and effect was unmistakable. We know how he felt because of our own experience. We know that anger, shutting us down emotionally and spiritually. We know that desire to just sulk or lash out against anyone who crosses us.

Self-pity is our sinful, selfish response to something not going the way we think it should. And it’s a subtle sin; we often don’t recognize it right away because it wears the disguise of righteous indignation. We feel justified to indulge it after the injustice we suffered, even if all that happened was we didn’t get our way.

But self-pity is a dangerous, deceitful, heart-hardening sin (Hebrews 3:13). It’s a spiritual deadener, choking faith, draining hope, killing joy, smothering love, fueling anger, and robbing any desire to serve others. And it is a feeder-sin, encouraging us to comfort our poor selves with all manner of sinful indulgence like gossip, slander, gluttony, substance abuse, pornography, and binge entertainment, just to name a few. Self-pity poisons our relationships and is often an underlying cause of our “burnout.”

Self-pity does us no good whatsoever, even if we’ve suffered a true injustice or bereavement or other evil. It is a closely clinging sin that only weighs us down like an anchor (Hebrews 12:1), so we must jettison it as soon as we recognize it.

Laying Aside the Weight of Self-Pity

There’s no magic formula for laying aside the weight of self-pity. Fighting sin is a martial art. Every response to every attack is at least slightly different. Our best defense is always to be saturated with the Bible, and in particular to keep ourselves refreshed in God’s promises. But as an example, here’s how I recently battled self-pity:

Ask God for help (Luke 11:9). Self-pity, like most sins, is an expression of pride. It is typically hard to let go of because we must admit our wrong when we have felt in the right. My self-pity almost always affects someone else and it is surprisingly hard to admit my wrong to them. I need God’s help.

Give yourself some gospel straight-talk. When I feel self-pity I need to remind myself what I really deserve and what Christ has done for me (Matthew 18:21–35), to be content with what I receive from the Lord (Philippians 4:12–19). Essentially, I graciously tell myself to stop being a big, selfish baby.

Repent to God for the sin of self-pity (Matthew 3:2; Revelation 2:5). It’s a sin, not merely a “struggle.” It’s to be killed, tossed away.

Repent to those affected by your sin of self-pity (James 5:16). Frequently this step of self-humbling is where the hold of self-pity is broken.

In faith take the next step God gives you to face what you don’t want to face (Philippians 4:6–7, 9, 19). If you feel self-pity over facing a frightening or unpleasant situation and you feel overwhelmed, do the next thing. God will give you grace to see and take the next step.

If self-pity has become an ingrained habit over a long time, freedom can be yours in Christ, but only through the constant practice of laying aside this sin (Hebrews 5:14). God will help you develop habits of faith to replace habits of sin. It will take a while, and that’s okay. Persevere. And involve those around you who are spiritually mature. They are experienced in this fight and will know how to lovingly exhort and encourage you.

The End of Discontentment

You were made for another world. It’s why the mirage of contentment in earthly things always dissipates as soon as you get near where it seemed to appear.

This repeated experience makes people cynical. Contentment is a fairytale, they think, not found in the real world. They’re partly right and very wrong. Contentment really exists and its source is the source of all the great fairytales. You just won’t find it in this world’s pleasures. Those pleasures aren’t meant to satisfy; they’re meant to point to satisfaction.

If you embrace this truth you will realize the end of your discontentment. For your discontentment has an end, and if you pursue that end rightly, one day your discontentment will end.

The Fairytale Story of Contentment

Once upon a time, when the world was young — not only new-young, but innocent-young — the king and queen of the living lived contented in the garden of God. They had everything they needed, and so they did not need much, at least not by our standards. For they had infinitely more: they walked every day with their Creator. And he infused their every moment and every movement with meaning. They loved and trusted him as perfect children love and trust a perfect father. They did not live by fruit alone but on every word that proceeded from the mouth of God.

Then came a fateful day when the king and queen of the living chose to eat the lone fruit forbidden by the word of God. They believed that there was more life in the fruit than in the Word of life. But there was death in the fruit, death that meant more than mortality. The contentment they sought in the fruit died as they ate. In a moment they lost their innocence and grew old — old with a knowledge far more evil than good — and the young world aged with them.

Then ended the wonderful days of meaningful contentment when all they needed was God and what he provided and promised them. Then began the vain discontented days of striving after the wind. The fairytale turned nightmare.

But though the fallen children ceased their faithful perfection, the Creator-Father remained perfect and in perfect, steadfast love immediately set into motion the eucatastrophe of redemption that would undo the catastrophe the king and queen had brought upon themselves and all their descendants. For any of them willing to trust him fully again, God would himself bear the just punishment he had pronounced upon them and restore to them sinless perfection, immortality, and all the contentment in him they could possibly contain.

And as a great mercy to them in their fallen, rebellious state, he made their affliction of chronic, unquenchable discontentment a clue: it would be a constant reminder that contentment exists and a pointer to where it is found.

Your Discontentment Has an End

And this is the end — the goal — of your discontentment: it’s a mercifully frustrating, chronic, daily reminder that the fruit on the trees of the world can never replace God. They cannot; they were never meant to. C.S. Lewis said it beautifully:

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.” (Mere Christianity, 136–137)

Let’s read the last sentence again:

“Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

This profound insight not only helps us understand the role of earthly pleasures, but also helps us understand the only way we can really enjoy earthly pleasures: as pointers to God. That’s what Paul was getting at when he wrote to Timothy, “As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17).

Purely enjoyable things come from God. But like Adam and Eve who set their hope in the forbidden fruit to make them content with God-likeness, if we set our hope in money to make us content with being able to buy enjoyable things, it all backfires. Money might run out. But even if it doesn’t, what gives us full enjoyment in the brief shelf life of good earthly things is knowing that God, our eternal, never-failing Fountain, is providing them.

Good earthly things cannot satisfy your chronic desire for contentment. They are designed to arouse your desire so that you remember you are made for another world.

The End of Your Discontentment

Assuming you trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and all his promises to you, even eternal life, a day is coming when the restless discontentment you experience now will be eradicated and there will be no seeking contentment in anything instead of God. You will fully enjoy all things because of God and only for his sake.

The Bible does tell us that we can experience contentment on earth, though not the full contentment of heaven. John Piper describes it as “dissatisfied contentment” because it sees Christ as the greatest gain (Philippians 3:8) and trusts and rests fully in God’s promises, yet in the midst of a broken, constantly needy world. Still, this is the best contentment in this world, a taste of heaven that frees us to live simply (1 Timothy 6:8; Hebrews 13:5) and even endure suffering (Philippians 4:11–13; 2 Corinthians 12:10) on earth because for us to live is Christ and to die is gain (Philippians 1:21).

We are made for another world. And the end of our current discontent is to point us to the eternal end of our discontent.

The Home of the Brave

The day Saul of Tarsus became a Christian he became a homeless man.

Up till then he had enjoyed a privileged cultural status. A “Hebrew of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5) whose star was rising in the Pharisee party, Saul lived at the center of Jewish religious and political life in the holiest city on earth. His future looked bright.

Then Jesus blinded him with a brighter light and all that privilege got dumped on the side of the Damascus road.

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ. (Philippians 3:7–8)

Saul knew immediately what gaining Christ would cost him in Jewish Palestine. He had exacted that price from other Christians. He also knew that pagan Rome, which had recently killed his new Lord, would certainly not be more accommodating. The day Saul became a citizen in heaven (Philippians 3:20) he became homeless on earth. And Saul’s homelessness has proven to be one of the greatest gifts the world has received.

Becoming Homeless in America

Every true Christian is homeless on earth. All the New Testament writers make this clear. But many Christians living in America have found this reality hard to comprehend. America has essentially considered itself Christian, so Christians have felt at home here.

Of course, America was never officially Christian. What’s made America Christian is that Christian assumptions and values have dominated the culture simply due to broad religious consensus.

With most Americans calling themselves Christian for most of American history, the Christian worldview naturally shaped American culture. Americans have vigorously, and sometimes violently, disputed over politics, ethics, and, yes, religion. But they’ve done so largely within a Christian worldview.

This has made America seem Christian. So it’s easy to understand how civic duty and religious faith have intertwined in many American Christian minds. Loyalty to America has often felt like loyalty to God’s kingdom, something Saul of Tarsus never experienced.

But this is changing in America. Slowly, over decades, Christian assumptions and values have been replaced by different assumptions and values. We’re now reaching a cultural tipping point and everyone feels the change accelerating. America is rapidly ceasing to be Christian.

This leaves many American Christians feeling like they’re losing their country. But they’re not. Not at all. The Christian homeland stands eternally, unchangeably firm. It’s simply becoming clearer that America is not that homeland.

Desiring a Better Country

The changes occurring in America may not be good for America; they may in fact be disastrous. But the separation of church and state in the minds of American Christians is a very good thing.

The place we consider home profoundly shapes how we live. Our true home is the place we feel most “at home,” the place we really belong. Our true home provides our deepest sense of identity. Home is where we want to sink our roots. Home is where we invest our greatest treasure, therefore home always owns our hearts (Matthew 6:21). Home is the place we long for when we’re not there. And like Dorothy discovered in Oz, absence from home is often the best way to learn that there’s no place like home.

And for Christians, there’s no place like home on earth. Saul of Tarsus, our great apostolic homeless friend and mentor, put it like this:

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. (2 Corinthians 5:6–9)

Our home as Christians is where the Lord is. We long to be with him and he longs for this too (John 17:24). By the immeasurably merciful gift of the Holy Spirit, we carry a measure of home with us now: the indwelling presence of the Father and the Son (John 14:23). But as long as we live “in the body” we will, we must, be homesick. For we are “away from the Lord” in his full satisfying glory. We’re “strangers and exiles” here, even in America (Hebrews 11:13). We “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16).

The Home of the Brave

One of the greatest gifts the world has ever received is the Christian homelessness of Saul of Tarsus. Once liberated from his earthly home, he was free to do a world of eternal good. For him, life became fruitful labor for the eternal glory of Christ and the eternal good of souls. And death became the gain of his heart’s desire: finally going home (Philippians 1:21–26). Either way he could not lose. He lived homeless and free, and so changed the course of history and helped save billions of souls.

Only strangers and exiles sojourning to heaven are free enough from the conflict of earthly interest to seek the highest good of human souls. That’s why we will not love America as we ought until we lose America as our home. But if the changes occurring in America result in more American Christians becoming homeless like Saul, imagine the eternal good that might flood not only America but the world.

You see, America isn’t the true home of the brave; heaven is. It is citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20) who count earthly gain as loss (Philippians 3:8) that are free to live “outside the camp” as homeless exiles on earth, bearing Jesus’s reproach (Hebrews 13:13). These are the people “of good courage” who, whether at home or away, make their life’s aim to please the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8–9).

My Friend Was Like Grass

As I write, I’m preparing to bury a good friend. Another victim of cancer. Another casualty of the Fall. Another reminder of the ignoble prosaic ending to the poem so noble and full of wild glory that neither tongues of men nor angels can fully capture: a human life. An ordinary human life.

There actually exists no such thing: an ordinary human life. It is a great misnomer, an oxymoron of colossal proportion. To think a life ordinary is to believe a delusion and reveals the shameful fact that we can barely bear true beauty. We tire quickly of sunsets, find wind inconvenient, and define boring as watching the grass grow. It is a very strange thing that we find violent virtual deaths in our films more exciting than the gentle life that miraculously awakens when buried, pushes up through the dark soil, catches the sunlight for food, and grows into a brilliantly green brush stroke of beauty in the very real landscape art we view in full 4D every day.

“As for man, his days are like grass” (Psalm 103:15). Perhaps that is why we find the lives of men boring and ordinary. Watching a man is like watching the grass grow.

The Grass Withers

My friend was like grass. But he found the adventure of grass less boring than most of us. For much of his life he was a farmer. Year after year he tilled the dark soil, buried the seeds, and watched the epic of nourishing life slowly unfold. He endured the suspense and sometimes the tragedies of storms, droughts, and pestilence. He knew that the flower of field was both fiercely resilient and fearfully fragile.

My friend was like grass. His life was one of unassuming beauty. In the landscape of reality you would not notice him unless you took the time to look carefully. He was gentle and quiet. He moved like the slow, steady rhythms of the seasons. He was poetry in motion. But we frenetic 21st century westerners, who have largely lost the patience required for poetry, might call it slow motion.

With unpretentious drama he came to faith in the living Christ while young, faithfully loved a faithful wife for forty years, and faithfully raised three children well into adulthood, each child now sharing his faith. And he faithfully shared his faith with anyone willing to listen, and many who weren’t. Even in the evening of his life, when his grass-like body was withering, hospice nurses heard about his hope in the sun of righteousness, the bright morning star, who makes it possible for us, even though we die, to live in the eternal morning where the grass of God withers no more (Psalm 90:5–6; Malachi 4:2; John 11:25–26; 1 Peter 3:15; Revelation 21:4; Revelation 22:16).

My friend was like grass. Grass might seem to grow slowly, but in reality its poetic life is brief. The scorching wind of cancer passed over him and now he is gone (Psalm 103:16). He suffered the ignoble dishonor of death, and this week we will sow the perishable remains of this gentle, down-to-earth man, like a seed, in the ground.

But make no mistake: we will indeed sow it. For it is the core of the Christian hope, the hope at the core of my friend’s very soul, that what is sown perishable will be raised imperishable, what is sown in weakness will be raised in power, what is sown natural will be raised spiritual (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).

When Grass Will Flourish Forever

A day is coming when we will know the epic story of this quiet, grass-like man has always been far more thrilling than the best novels and the greatest films. We will marvel at our former dullness, having ever considered such a thing ordinary.

Someday the curse will be reversed and we will not have the patience to watch the millisecond epics of cinematic mass murder that captured the imagination of fallen man. We will not have the capacity to find dim phantasmal shadows entertaining at all. Not when what is playing out before us in vibrant colors now inconceivable is the gloriously wild real story of everlasting grass that, having burst from the ground, is alive with the light of the undying Star.

If We Love God Most, We Will Love Others Best

The most loving thing we can do for others is love God more than we love them. For if we love God most, we will love others best.

I know this sounds like preposterous gobbledygook to an unbeliever. How can you love someone best by loving someone else most? But those who have encountered the living Christ understand what I mean. They know the depth of love and breadth of grace that flows out from them toward others when they themselves are filled with love for God and all he is for them and means to them in Jesus. And they know the comparatively shallow and narrow love they feel toward others when their affection for God is ebbing.

There’s a reason why Jesus said the second greatest commandment is like the first: if we love God with all our heart, we will love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39). It functions like faith and works; if we truly have the first, the second naturally follows.

But if God is not the love of our life, there is no way that we will truly love our neighbor as ourselves. For we will love ourselves supremely.

He First Loved Us

The reason we will love others best when we love God most is that love in its truest, purest form only comes from God, because God is love (1 John 4:7–8). Love is a fundamental part of his nature. We are only able to love him or anyone else because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). We are only able to give freely to others what we have received freely from him.

And as God’s image-bearers (Genesis 1:26), we are designed to love God and others in the same way that God loves God and others. God, being the most pure, perfect, powerful, and precious entity in existence, must love himself most in order to love everything else best, since everything else is “from him and through him and to him” (Romans 11:36). If God loved something or someone else more than himself he would be violating the first commandment (Exodus 20:3) and the foremost commandment (Matthew 22:37–38). For God to love something or someone more than himself would be inappropriate, perverted, immoral. Like God, we must love him supremely in order to love everything else best.

The Horrible Result of Not Loving God Most

When we (or anything else, if that’s possible) become our supreme love instead of God, love becomes distorted and diseased. Love ends up devolving into whatever we wish for it to mean.

This is a great evil, greater than we often realize. This is the world as we know it: everyone loves in the way that is right in his own eyes. Which of course means that everyone hates in the way that is right in his own eyes. They become supreme “lovers of self” (2 Timothy 3:2) and live “in the passions of [their] flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind,” since they were “children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). It is not hard to understand why there is so much confusion and conflict and heartbreak and violence in the world. We live in an anarchy of love resulting in much of the horrifying things we hear in the news.

The Greatest Love Ever Shown

But God, being rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4), “so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The author and perfecter of love, Love himself, stepped into our horrible evil anarchy to redeem us (Romans 5:8), his people, and give us new life (Ephesians 2:5), and transform us from children of wrath back into children of God (John 1:12) who are able to love him supremely and therefore love each other rightly — the way he has loved us.

And how has he loved us? With the greatest love there is, the love that moves one to lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). But this doesn’t mean that Jesus loved us, his friends, more than his Father. It means that Jesus loved us best because he loved his Father most (John 17:26; Mark 14:36). And “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11).

What May Be Our Most Loving Act Today

So we see that if we love God most, we will love others best.

I find this to be a convicting and uncomfortable truth: How we love others, particularly other Christians, reveals how we love God. The apostle John puts it bluntly: “He who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20). Our love for each other is an indicator of the place God is holding in our hearts.

God is very good at designing things this way: our faith is revealed by our works (James 2:18), our creeds are revealed by our deeds (Luke 6:46), and our love for him is revealed by our love for others (1 John 4:20). He makes it very hard for us to fake it. And this is a great kindness (Romans 2:4).

Since the greatest and second greatest commandments are involved in these things, we know they are important to God. So perhaps the best thing we can do today is take an honest, lingering look at the way we love others, allow what we see to have its Philippians 2:12 effect on us, and ask God what he would have us do in response.

We may find that this is the most loving thing we will do for everyone else today.

Just One Verse

The Bible is a strange world. It is much, much larger on the inside than it is on the outside. Indeed, worlds of truth can be found in just one verse.

Consider the English Bible’s shortest verse. It takes less than a second to read the two simple words: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). But if we step into this verse, we discover complexity of cosmic proportions. This tiny linguistic shell contains a world of widespread wonder.

Jesus

Set out to explore just the domain represented by Jesus and after many days we will find ourselves neither closer to the horizon’s edge before us nor nearer the starry expanse above us. For when we ponder the Infinite taking the form of the finite and the Immortal clothed with mortality; as we consider that the eternal Second Person of the Trinity, through whom and for whom all things were created (Colossians 1:16), was found in the unimaginable constraint of historical time, occupying the miniscule space of a human form (Philippians 2:8), we are traveling a terrain of mystery immeasurable. In the hollow of this single word is a world without end.

Wept

And look! Beside the endless world is an unfathomable sea! Can you contain in your human brain the currents that coursed through the divine mind as the Word made flesh (John 1:14), the Resurrection and the Life (John 11:25), wept outside the tomb of a man whose death he purposefully allowed, a death he was about to destroy? What quaked deep inside his divinely human soul that heaved his oceanic emotions, causing his tearful tide to flow just before he commanded the beloved man’s mortis to lose its fatal rigor? If we set sail upon the weeping of Jesus we will discover such New Covenant continents as Abounding Grace, Substitution, Atonement, Propitiation, Redemption, Peace, Joy Unspeakable, and Everlasting Life. There is an Ocean Pacific in this drop of a tear.

The Best Adventure Is in the Ancient Book

Two words. Just two words out of nearly 800,000 in an English Bible.

O, Holy Bible! So misjudged by your unadorned cover, your disarmingly plain literary styles, your narrative understatements, and your colossal claims. Yet your words tell a story unparalleled and unrivaled, the greatest epic of all time. And your words, your words! They hold worlds of truth and oceans of meaning! And you have come to us out of the ancient past, through war and flame and deprivation and death. You come to us upon rivers of sacrificial blood, sweat, and tears that we might know what we must know to be forever free (John 8:32).

And O, we humans! Such facility for glory, such capacity for wonder if we will but take up the quest! Yet we can seek the cinema for excitement and the novel for novelty, spending our wonder on worlds that aren’t real while neglecting the real wonder-filled worlds contained in the words of the ancient book lying under-opened on our tables. Indeed, we are far too easily pleased.

This summer (or winter, southern hemisphere inhabitants) resolve again to take up the ancient book. Do not merely trot quickly and lightly over its words on your way to fun in the sun. For it has the power to soak your summer with substantial light and fill your fun from the fountain of awe.

This invitation is not to a religious obligation but to a glorious adventure, the best adventure, and in the end, the only adventure. You will not need to read long to find it. For if you look, you will find it in just one verse.

Born This Way

Lady Gaga (Stefani Germanotta) speaks for millions in her song “Born This Way,” when she declares,

I’m beautiful in my way,

‘Cause God makes no mistakes

I’m on the right track, baby

I was born this way (Streamline/Interscope/KonLive, 2011)

The song is a hodgepodge of pluralistic affirmations, but its dominant message is unmistakably sexual, which Gaga’s music video makes explicitly clear (viewer discretion strongly advised):

No matter gay, straight, or bi

Lesbian, transgendered life

I’m on the right track, baby

I was born to survive

“Born This Way” is a pop anthem of Western culture, a musical declaration of sexual independence. But it is not revolutionary, like Queen’s “We Will Rock You” or “We Are the Champions” from a generation ago. Gaga (a name inspired by Queen’s “Radio Gaga”) is singing a mainstream manifesto, a dominant cultural belief about self-identity: I am my sexuality (my sexual desires and self-determined gender identity), I am beautiful, and I was born this way.

As Christians, how do we respond? This question is crucial. And for many of us it is not abstract, but personally painful. For not only do we live daily engaged in a war of resistance against our own sexual brokenness, but people very precious to us have anguished and struggled over disordered sexual orientations and desires and, not seeing change, have embraced this manifesto. And in our biblical convictions they often hear an unloving rejection of who they believe they are as persons. What do we say to them?

A Loving Affirmation of True Personhood

The first thing we say without hesitancy is that we really do love them deeply. And God, who is love, also loves them deeply — deeper than they (or we) comprehend (1 John 4:8; John 3:16).

And we do love them for who they really are as persons. But who they are fundamentally is something far greater than their sexual experience, as prominent and at times dominant as that can feel. They are glorious creatures uniquely made in God’s image as males and females (Genesis 1:26–27).

Though Christians are accused of holding bigoted and inhumane beliefs about sexuality, this is not true. Our view of sexuality is rooted not in fear or self-righteous prudery. It is rooted in our high view of human dignity as God’s image-bearers. That’s why we do not believe that sexuality defines humanity, nor do we believe humanity defines sexuality. Being human, and thus made in the likeness of God, is so noble a thing that God alone reserves the right to confer the definition of our true personhood. We do not say with Lady Gaga, “I’m beautiful in my way.” We say, “I am beautiful in God’s way.” To the degree that we abandon God’s way, we abandon our beauty.

We Were Born Broken

This then leads us to say something about our personhood that is not beautiful: We are broken image-bearers. There is a profound truth in the statement, “I was born this way,” but not in the sense that Lady Gaga means. In myriad ways, we were all born broken (Romans 1:29–31). We are not “on the right track, baby,” we are off the tracks.

Our sexuality is a particular witness against us that something is wrong with us (Romans 1:26–27). We all know this (Romans 1:32). The spectrum of human sexual brokenness is broad, covering almost everything imaginable, even if unspeakable, since almost everything that can be sexually imagined, experienced, and practiced beyond God’s design has been imagined, experienced, and practiced by people since times ancient. That’s why the sexual prohibitions cataloged in Leviticus 18 are so specific: They were the (often literally) familiar sexual practices of the peoples of Canaan (Leviticus 18:24). And this list is not exhaustive. Some things simply shouldn’t be said (Ephesians 5:12).

But they are said. And done. We are reminded daily that all the sexual practices in times ancient are practiced today. This sexual brokenness is not beautiful. Our brokenness is not beautiful and none of our manifestos can make it so. Calling our brokenness wholeness does not make it whole. It only affirms the disintegration of our true personhood.

For our brokenness is part of the curse from the fall and fueled by our indwelling sin (Genesis 3:16–19). Our deepest brokenness is not our defects, but our defiance against God, our desire to be our own god. This sin infects and affects our whole being, making us “children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3) who participate in “unfruitful works of darkness” (Ephesians 5:11).

We were born this way: broken. What we need is to be born again (John 3:3).

God Makes No Mistakes

This is where we have abundant hope to offer. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” who came “into the world [not] to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him (John 3:16–17). He came to pay the penalty for our sin, to provide the power for us to once again walk in the freedom of faith in his word, no longer slaves to sin-induced brokenness (Romans 6:17). He came to save us from the way we were born and give us new life.

“God makes no mistakes,” that is true. Not one of us is a mistaken creation (Acts 17:26). But it is a mistake to infer from this, as Lady Gaga does, that all our various sexual inclinations are gifts from God. For that’s not what God says. God makes no mistakes, so we must listen to him.

That is the path of life. That’s what a Christian does: We listen to God the Father who says of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him” (Mark 9:7). And only Jesus has the words of eternal life (John 6:68), the truth that can set us free (John 8:32).

Whoever really wants to be on the right track, whoever wants to be truly beautiful, whoever wants to be born into a “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) must believe in the God who makes no mistakes. We must trust his promises to redeem us and make us happy more than we trust the promises that our sexual preferences, orientations, or imaginations make to us.

Better Than the Way We Were Born

Jesus does not promise that if we believe in him all our broken inclinations will disappear in this age (though he promises this in the age to come). But he does promise that if we will deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow him, we will save our lives (Luke 9:23–24).

This was not a popular invitation when it was offered, and it is not popular now. Lady Gaga’s manifesto is. But not all ways that seem right lead to life (Proverbs 14:12).

Though our biblical convictions might sound like unloving rejection to a loved one, they are not. What’s not love is to simply let a loved one gain the world and lose his soul (Luke 9:25). There is a better way to live than the way we were born.

Humility Is Not Always Nice

Humble people aren’t always what we think they ought to be. They aren’t always modest, they aren’t always agreeable and submissive, and they aren’t always nice — at least in the ways we proud people think those qualities are supposed to look in humble people.

We do tend to find true humility attractive when we recognize it, but we don’t always recognize it. Sometimes we mistake humility for pride and pride for humility. And truth be told, we don’t always like to be around humble people.

Humble People Don’t Think Much of Themselves

Most of us would agree that humble people don’t think much of themselves. But often what we have in mind is self-deprecation; humble people think of themselves as lowly. And this is true. In view of God’s holiness and their sinfulness, they don’t think more highly of themselves than they ought to think (Romans 12:3). Their healthy, proportionate view of their own depravity causes them to consider others more important than themselves (Philippians 2:3).

But self-deprecation isn’t the primary trait of humility. The primary trait of humble people is that they just don’t think much of themselves — meaning they are not self-preoccupied. They have better, higher, more glorious things to be occupied with.

We can find this trait refreshing because humble people, seeing all things in relation to God, look for and enjoy God’s glory in all that he has made (Romans 1:20). This allows them to most fully enjoy what God has made — including us. When we’re with them they often help us do the same thing. And few things are as wonderfully refreshing as forgetting ourselves for a while because we’re absorbed in something more glorious.

But we can also find this trait convicting because it exposes our self-obsession. We are so used to people (especially ourselves) being self-conscious and self-centered that when we’re with people who aren’t, our own pride stands in stark contrast.

Humble People Prefer Windows to Mirrors

Not thinking much of themselves (in both senses) means that humble people prefer windows to mirrors. Desiring to see the glory of God in everything frees them from needing to see how everything else reflects on them.

Humble people view other people as God’s marvelous image-bearers, windows to God’s glory, not as mirrors that enhance or diminish their own self-image. But this also means they aren’t absorbed by how others view them. So they aren’t worried about reading the “right” books, seeing the “right” movies, listening to the “right” music, living in the “right” home, having the “right” job, being seen with the “right” people, etc. That’s a mirror mindset. They view these things as windows to see and savor God’s glory.

Humble People Are Authentically Counter-Cultural

This makes humble people authentically counter-cultural. A culture comprised of pride-infected people produces a lot of pressure for people to conform to cultural expectations. Even much that poses as non-conformity is really just subcultural conformity — an attempt to fit into some subgroup.

Humble people are unusually unaffected by this pressure to conform. They can be hard to categorize because they often don’t fit neatly into any cultural mold. They tend to eschew using trendy fashions or interests or social media as means of personal branding. They have preferences about those things, but they hold those preferences as ways of enjoying God’s manifold goodness rather than image-enhancers.

And it’s this lack of self-preoccupation that really runs counter to the cultures or subcultures that humble people live in. This deficit of self-importance usually isn’t considered cool by cultural cool-definers. It makes humble people odd.

Humble People Are Offensive

One of the things that can surprise us about truly humble people, which can sometimes be mistaken for pride, is that they can be quite offensive. Humble people, being without guile, say it like it is. And saying it like it is can sting, and even sound condemning.

Jesus could fling some zingers. He called religious leaders a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 12:34) and sons of the devil (John 8:44), and he called the crowd and even his own disciples a “faithless and twisted generation” (Matthew 17:17). Humble Paul publicly rebuked Peter (Galatians 2:11-14) and told the Galatians they were “foolish” (Galatians 3:1). These weren’t “nice” things to say. Humble people don’t always say nice things. They say honest things that can have sharp edges and wound. Because of this they can be accused of pride.

But there is a qualitative difference between the offensiveness of the proud and the offensiveness of the humble. The proud offend to exalt or defend themselves and control or manipulate others. The humble offend in order to advance the truth for the glory of God and ultimate good of others. Humble offensiveness may not be popular, but it’s always loving.

King David knew this, which is why he wrote, “Let a righteous man strike me — it is a kindness; let him rebuke me — it is oil for my head” (Psalm 141:5). His son Solomon also knew this and wrote, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Proverbs 27:6). Humility can wound and pride can kiss. Kisses may feel better than wounds — at first. But later, the wounds foster health and the kisses corruption.

Walk Humbly

That’s why humble people aren’t always what we think they ought to be. They are disagreeable when truth must be valued over relational harmony. They are un-submissive when conformity mars God’s glory. And their company can be unpleasant, even undesired, when their wounding words are kinder than selfish flattery or silence.

And this is the kind of people God is calling us to be, people who do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with him (Micah 6:8). He wants us to be absorbed in things more glorious than ourselves (Philippians 4:8), to prefer windows to mirrors (Philippians 2:3), to live counter to every culture we live in (Hebrews 11:13), and, when love requires it and it would give grace to those who hear, to be humbly offensive (Ephesians 4:29).

To be humble people requires much grace. But the good news is that God is able to make this grace abound to us (2 Corinthians 9:8), and he offers it to us if we will receive it (James 4:6).

More from Desiring God

Why Is Humility So Attractive? | We are attracted to humility because we are designed to be attracted to God. What we find attractive in humble people is the Imago Dei.

Are You Humble Enough to Be Care-Free? | Pastor John, preaching from 1 Peter 5:5–7, explains the humility of casting our anxieties on God and how undue worry about our future is probably a form of pride.

What Makes the Humble Happy? | Humility is most fundamentally a trembling love for the majesty of God and secondarily a trembling sense of our sin and smallness and dependence.

You Don’t Have to Know God’s Will

You don’t have to know God’s will if you are confident in God’s word.

If that raises objections, trust me, I understand. Like you, I have significant questions that I don’t have answers for. I have personal quandaries, parenting quandaries, ministry quandaries, financial quandaries, etc. Some are massively important and I’m not sure what to do. This can tempt me to fear. I’ve prayed about these things, some for quite a while. Clarity has not yet come.

But over the decades I’ve followed him, Jesus has made something very clear to me in the Scriptures, the lives of eminent saints, and my own stumbling experience: living in the will of God is more about knowing and trusting his specific promises than receiving specific direction (Hebrews 11:8). It’s more about resting in his sovereignty than wrestling with my ambiguity (Psalm 131:1–2).

I’ve learned and continue to learn that embracing God’s will for me largely consists in transferring my confidence from my own miniscule capacity to understand what’s going on and why to God’s omniscient and completely wise understanding (Proverbs 3:5–6).

Our Felt Need is Often Not Our Fundamental Need

As the result of the Fall, we all come into the world wildly and irrationally over-confident in ourselves. When God redeems us in Christ, he enrolls us in a discipleship program uniquely tailored to the purposes he has for each of us. He knows that for us to live according to his will, our fundamental need is a significant loss of self-confidence and a significant gain in God-confidence.

But this is usually not our felt need. The need we typically feel is to know specifically what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to go, how our needs will be provided, or why the terrible thing happened.

What we’re seeking for and hope to find in those answers are certainty and security — peace. But due to our manifold limitations on every level, the answers we think we want would rarely provide us the peace we seek. God knows his explanations would not even make sense to us since we lack the capacities to comprehend the complexity of the equation. That’s why Hudson Taylor counsels us to,

“make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign, and has the right to do as He pleases with His own, and he may not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you.” (A Camaraderie of Confidence, p. 31)

Our infinite Sovereign knows that our fundamental need is to learn to trust him over our very finite selves. He knows that trust will provide us what explanations won’t: the peace that surpasses understanding (Philippians 4:7).

That’s why when we pray about God’s will for us, God’s answers often aim at addressing this fundamental need: learning to trust him over our understanding (Proverbs 3:5). But because we are focused on our felt needs, we often fail to recognize God’s answers at first. He is addressing a need we have, but don’t feel. So it can seem like God is ignoring our need for the peace we long for.

How God Meets Our Need for Peace

But God is most certainly not ignoring our need for peace. He has promised that we will experience peace through believing (Romans 15:13). Believing what? Believing his “precious and very great promises” (2 Peter 1:4).

This is what I mean when I say that we don’t need to know God’s will if we are confident in God’s word. When God’s direction and purposes for us are unclear, his promises are always crystal clear. God frequently calls us to stand on the rock of his promises and faithfulness in the murky, swirling fog of perplexing circumstances (Hebrews 10:23). Is this not the story of almost every Biblical saint?

God’s promises are the checks that are accepted at the bank of heaven. They are God’s promissory notes to us, guaranteeing that he will make good on the value they represent. No matter how things appear at any given time, no matter how dark, foreboding, lonely, depressing, even hopeless things look, God always makes good on his promises. And he wants us to cash them. That’s why Charles Spurgeon said,

“When I pray, I like to go to God just as I go to a bank clerk when I have [a] cheque to be cashed. I walk in, put the cheque down on the counter, and the clerk gives me my money, I take it up, and go about my business.” (A Camaraderie of Confidence, p. 54)

That almost sounds flippant. It’s not. It’s experience. If there is anything we can legitimately name and claim as Christians, it is a clear promise of God. We cannot claim it on our own terms or timing, but we can in good conscience hold God to it, because it is God’s will to say yes in Christ to every promise he makes to us in the Bible (2 Corinthians 1:20). God’s word is as good as God.

Listen to the Cloud of Witnesses: Cash the Checks!

If you struggle to believe these things, join the club. It doesn’t come natural to any of us to trust God’s promises over our perceptions. God knows this and knows how to cultivate trust in us.

And one way he does this is through the testimonies of others who have put his promises to the test. This “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), those who have known God best, all cry: “cash the checks! They’re real!” Listen to them speak from the Scripture and church history.

One of my favorites, a man whose example convicts and encourages me every time I turn to him, is George Müller of Bristol. And speaking on behalf of the great cloud he says to us:

“Everyone is invited and commanded to trust in the Lord, to trust in Him with all his heart, and to cast his burden upon Him, and to call upon Him in the day of trouble. Will you not do this, my dear brethren in Christ? I long that you may do so. I desire that you may taste the sweetness of that state of heart, in which, while surrounded by difficulties and necessities, you can yet be at peace, because you know that the living God, your Father in heaven, cares for you.” (A Camaraderie of Confidence, p. 83)

God has given you the checks of his promises and you are invited to take them to the bank of heaven. If you want peace, the peace that surpasses understanding and guards your heart and mind during your most embattled, stormy, confusing, and frightening moments, you must cash the checks. For this peace comes only from trust.

If you do, you will be able to live at peace in the midst of many quandaries not yet knowing God’s specific will because you are confident in God’s specific word.

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Why Is Humility So Attractive?

Why are we attracted to humble people?

Why did atheist Mark Twain find the devout Catholic Joan of Arc’s humility so beautiful that she became his historical hero? Why do people all over the world, even of other religions, find Jesus’s lowliness so compelling (Matthew 11:29)? Conversely, why do people like Michael Prowse feel revulsion in the divine pride they think they hear in God’s biblical commands that we worship him?

There is something about humility that resonates deeply in our psyches, far deeper than evolutionary explanations go.

More than Evolutionary Residue

Evolutionary sociobiologists explain our innate pride as a primal survival instinct. The theory is that our desire to dominate and manipulate others is a genetic residue of our ancient evolutionary struggle to compete in the winner-take-all contest of natural selection. But while this might fit well in that theoretical framework, it does not sit well in our souls.

We know instinctively, at a level deeper than mere enlightened self-interest and social reinforcement, at a level just as (or more) primal to our pride, that we are meant to behave differently from other creatures. We know that the “alpha” behavior that becomes a silverback gorilla does not, for some reason, become us.

We Know Pride Is Pathological

We know that for us, pride is pathological. Try as we might, we cannot come to peace with our conceit. When we do try, we must struggle hard to suppress our conscience, which keeps warning us of its evil. And when we don’t see the evil clearly in ourselves, we surely see it clearly in others. When we see it on a large enough scale, something tells us that a good transcending even the interest of the human species has been violated. Hitler’s diabolism is still too fresh for us to ignore.

We know instinctively that pride is a mark of a lesser human soul, while humility is a mark of a great-souled person. That’s why humans have always regarded true humility as truly honorable while regarding those who have acted most like animal alphas as human monsters. We find something pathetic and degrading about the man who must have as many women as he can or as much power as he can or as much attention as he can. We know this betrays a hole in his soul.

How do we know these things? Deep down in the primal places of our personhood, perhaps scripted into our genetic code, we carry the ancient historical knowledge that we humans, unlike the other terrestrial creatures, are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). We are unique, there is a holiness about us, and we are subject to a holy moral law that requires us to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God” (Micah 6:8).

We are attracted to humility because we are designed to be attracted to God. What we find attractive in humble people is the Imago Dei.

What Is Humility?

I don’t find most of the dictionary definitions of humility very helpful. They tend to emphasize the quality one not thinking oneself as better than others, which is a biblical quality (Philippians 2:3). But that’s more of an expression of humility than a definition.

A helpful biblical definition of humility is found in Romans 12:3, where Paul says that a person should “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” In other words, humility is an accurate estimation of our self-importance in relation to God and others. It is not inappropriate self-exaltation or self-abasement. Pride then is the over-estimation of our self-importance in relation to God and others.

Why Humility Looks Different in God and Us

God is humble, the most humble person in existence. He is also the greatest. So God’s humility, his accurate assessment his self-importance in relation to everything else, is holy — its expression is unique to anyone else’s.

For example, since God is supreme in everything, including supremely satisfying to us, it’s not proud of him to declare it (Psalm 97:9; Philippians 2:9). And since we always express our greatest enjoyments by praising them, it isn’t vain of God to command our praise. God’s humility and love in fact require him to exhort us to enjoy our deepest satisfaction as opposed to lesser ones.

For us, accurately assessing our self-importance as it relates to God and everything else will often be expressed differently from God, since we’re not God. If we commanded others to praise us it would be the pinnacle of pride.

True humility pushes us to extremes. On one end there’s the glorious privilege of being an image-bearer of God, a reality we’ve hardly begun to understand. On the other end we have horribly sinned against God (Romans 3:23) and it required Jesus’s death to redeem us (2 Corinthians 5:21), also a reality the depths of which we’ve barely plumbed. And then there’s the humbling fact that our tenure and impact on this earth is comparable to grass (Psalm 103:15).

Attracted to Jesus

But’s God’s humility is not always expressed differently from ours, though we will never match his scope. There is one place where we clearly see the height of his glory in the depth of his magnificent humility, and when we really see it, it resonates in the deepest places of our psyches: in the Incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus.

[For] though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)

There it is. That’s the humility that all but the most hardhearted among us find beautiful. This is the fundamental reason we are attracted to humble people, because we see in them he likeness of God in Christ.

God’s wonderful invitation to us through Paul is to “have this mind,” for in Christ it can be ours (Philippians 2:5). Today we can have this mind by repenting of any pride we are aware of, embracing an honest self-assessment of who we are, meditating on Philippians 2:1-11, and obeying what it says.

More From Desiring God

What Is Humility? | Pastor John gives us five descriptions or manifestations of humility.

How to Fight the Sin of Pride, Especially When You Are Praised? | Pastor John provides 10 ways we can fight pride when we receive praise.

Greatness, Humility, Servanthood | John Piper unpacks Mark 10:32-45 and explains how gospel humility, Jesus-exalting humility is the true greatness of servanthood and does not make us gloomy, or timid, or passive. It makes us joyful, courageous, and industrious.